Enflorar: A Literary Día de los Muertos Ceremony
This is not a reading. It is a ceremony. An act of honoring our literary forebearers, our literary community, and our land. A literary celebration of Día de los Muertos rooted in Latine/x tradition.
Enflorar—to adorn or cover with flowers in Spanish—is a verb that calls us into a shared ritual of remembrance. On this night, we gather to remember the work and spirit of writers who shaped literary Seattle but are no longer with us, and to recognize the energy they placed into our community, an influence that continues to bear fruit today.
What does the life cycle mean for a literary community? What does it mean to remember the writers who came before us? Together, we reflect on these questions through offerings to the Literary Day of the Dead Altar unveiled this evening, a tradition that began last year through the collaboration between La Sala and Hugo House. This altar is not just a structure; it is a nexus point, a place where time folds and the living and the dead meet through language, legacy, and love.
Our literary role models are not gone. They live alongside us in their words, in the connections they forged, and in the energy they invested in us. We celebrate community not as a fixed location, but as a constellation of voices, places, and moments in reciprocal relationship.
This is a grief ritual, a celebration of life, and a healing act. We gather tonight to recognize language as a tool of memory, as a source of light. Join us in this ceremony of blooming remembrance, where Latine/x voices, ancestral presence, and our literary legacy come alive together.
This event is presented in partnership between La Sala and Hugo House with support from the City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture.
The House bar will be open to serve alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.Eric Acosta
Eric Michael Acosta is a poet living in Seattle. His debut collection Motion Flesh is out through Chat Room Books (2023). His follow-up Underbelly is out through Carbonation Press (2024). He runs the curated monthly performance series Unpoetry. Find more info at unpoetry.net or printcopiesavailable.com.
Marianne Giovinazzo
Marianne is a musician and mixed-media experimenter from Hermosillo, MX. Their work serves as a vessel of self-discovery that explores regret, change, nostalgia, and liberation. Marianne finds the challenge of expression across mediums exciting; It is discomfort met with reassurance and the attraction of learning something new. They are currently based out of Seattle as co-founder of indie multimedia collective HYPERboy.
Xochilt Martinez
Xóchilt Martinez is a Seattle born and raised poet and spoken word artist of Nicaraguan and Mexican heritage. Growing up queer and Latino in this primarily white city, in primarily white schools, poetry became the third place in which they discovered their belonging and voice. Their work deals with themes of identity, queerness, loss, language, culture, love, resistance, & connection.
Diego Garcia
Diego, known as @Agitprop_poet, crafts verse that agitates, illuminates, and refuses to look away. His poetry blends political urgency with lyrical precision, drawing from lived experience, collective memory, and radical imagination. Whether on stage or the page, Diego’s work challenges silence and celebrates resistance. He’s performed across the Pacific Northwest and beyond, building community through word and witness. Expect poems that provoke, mourn, and mobilize.
Claudia Castro Luna
Claudia Castro Luna is the author of Cipota Under the Moon (Tia Chucha Press, 2022); One River, A Thousand Voices (Chin Music Press, 2020 & 2022); Killing Marías (Two Sylvias, 2017) finalist for the WA State Book Award 2018, and the chapbook This City (Floating Bridge, 2016). She served as Washington’s State Poet Laureate (2018-2021) and as Seattle's inaugural Civic Poet (2015-2017). She was named Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow in 2019. Her most recent non-fiction is in There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis (Vintage). Born in El Salvador, Castro Luna came to the United States in 1981. Living in English and Spanish, she writes and teaches in Seattle on unceded Duwamish lands where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.
Paul Hhlava Ceballos
Paul Hlava Ceballos is the author of banana [ ], which won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. banana [ ] also was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award and the Kate Tufts Award. His collaborative chapbook, Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood, shares pages with Quenton Baker and Christina Sharpe. He is a CantoMundista and has been featured on the Poetry Magazine Podcast and Seattle’s The Stranger. He currently is the Poetry Editor of The Seattle Met and practices echocardiography.
